Myrna Blyth

Myrna Blyth is the editorial director of AARP Media. She is the former editor-in-chief and publishing director of Ladies' Home Journal, founding editor and publishing director of More magazine, and director of Magazine Development for the Meredith Corporation.

Can this magazine be saved? Unfortunately, no. Ladies’ Home Journal, America’s oldest women’s magazine, will cease monthly publishing with its July issue. A spokesman for its owner, Meredith Corp., said the 131-year-old title will totter on as a newsstand-only quarterly. What a sad ending for the publication that was once considered America’s premier women’s magazine. Launched in 1883 by Cyrus Curtis, who also started The Saturday Evening Post, LHJ developed out of the popular women’s page in Curtis’ first publication, …

In the early 1990s I presented Margaret Thatcher with an award at a convention in Florida. We both wore navy-and-white polka-dot power suits. I only realized that Britain’s former prime minister and I were dressed alike moments before we were supposed to go onstage. I didn’t have time to rush back to my room in the massive Disney World hotel and change. Trying to make the best of it, I said, “Lady Thatcher, I admire you so much that I …

Fifty years ago this month, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was published. Even the husband she divorced conceded that Betty “almost single-handedly changed the course of human history. It took a driven, super-aggressive, egocentric, almost lunatic dynamo to rock the world the way she did.” Yes, that was Betty. And that was The Book that launched the modern women’s movement. In her treatise, Betty described what she called “the problem that has no name”: the feelings of isolation, boredom …